Today, 16th August 2013, marks the 20th birthday of Debian GNU/Linux, one of the Linux world’s most venerable and respected distributions.
Ian Murdock founded the Debian Project back in 1993 and since then it has turned out to be a truly free community project aiming to build a free Linux operating system – something that would have been impossible without Debian’s strong community of users and developers.
In the intervening 20 years, Debian has grown to be one of the most influential and largest open source projects, used as a base in many popular Linux operating systems, such as Ubuntu.
Dubbed the “universal operating system” Debian is available in over 70 languages and supports an enormous range of computer types, with over 20,000 software packages for more than 10 different computer architectures.
I use the latest version of Debian – codenamed ‘wheezy’ – on my laptop, whilst my main desktop machine runs Mepis, a Debian derivative featuring the KDE desktop. Over the years, I’ve found Debian (and derivatives) very stable, reliable and secure.
Why not treat yourself on Debian’s birthday? Go and grab a disk image and install it! 🙂